Soil: Exploring and understanding Earth's inner space

Soils are fundamental to human civilizations. Understanding and effectively managing planet Earth’s soil resources is therefore critical to our future prosperity. Soils are remarkable but complex materials, and we are now beginning to understand how their health is founded on the interactions between the physical, chemical and biological components of which they are composed.

Most of the questions we need to answer to gain a more effective understanding of how soils work and ways to optimise their management, lie at the interface of many science disciplines. This conference will bring together a breadth of researchers to discuss the required multidisciplinary approaches that address key fundamental questions crossing the life and physical sciences that impact on the functionality of soils both within productivity and wider ecosystem frameworks.

In particular the conference will focus on novel and state-of-the-art concepts, and experimental and computational tools, to better understand the fundamental aspects of soil that impact on the functions of soil ecosystem, and means by which it can be effectively and sustainably managed.

Theme 1: Soil-Plant-Microbe interactions

Theme 2: Fundamental drivers of soil fertility

Theme 3: Soil the ultimate ecosystem engineer